FSW Insights: Supra-Referentiality and the Art of Luxury Brand Storytelling (download version)
Why narrative brand archetypes matter and how to build them
This white paper explores the current state of luxury brand storytelling and argues that brands can achieve stronger, more consistent stories through a narratological approach to branding, centering the brand as supra-referential or overarching, transcendent construct.
In this piece, we explore the current state of luxury brand storytelling and assess gaps in existing modes of brand marketing. When it comes to telling stories, luxury brands continue to rely heavily on top-down, brand-centric modes of storytelling and content marketing that are directly at odds with a retail and media landscape that is increasingly consumer-driven or bottom-up. This is especially true for heritage luxury brands with a strong creative director or senior leadership with strong views and entrenched ways of telling brand stories and marketing products.
Ultimately, we examine why narrative marketing matters for luxury brands to express their unique vision, values, and products in the right way. We ultimately argue that a luxury brand story should be an archetypal story (or what in the literary field of narratology is called supra-referentiality or an overarching, transcendent concept), building their brand into a timeless construct that is recognizable no matter how it is transformed and transmogrified across channels. Once this archetype is established, brands should then build a content strategy framework and roadmap that align this archetypal vision to consumer needs, both globally and channel by channel, over time in a way that can be tracked and measured. This formalized approach to luxury brand content strategy ensures that consumers will encounter the right stories and the right products at the right time on the right channel.
This was an excellent read! Thanks for sharing the Brand Archetype Matrix. It gave me some questions to start thinking about branding a new apparel company. At the moment, my “internal workshop” would just be me. Do you have any advice on creating brand references to put into a unique construct with a defined architecture? Also, once the archetype is defined, how does it translate to knowing how to market on the right channel? I understand how the archetype can ensure that consumers encounter the right stories and products at the right time, but the right channel confused me.